Dear Crane

A giant crane appears at the back windows of a residential street, its beam swinging freely, its red ‘eye’ seeming to overlook the lives on the other side of the glass. In her eighth collection of poems, Susan Wicks writes searchingly about our ordinary existence, its serendipities and unreliable sense-impressions, its delight in a new generation, its brief escapes – but this earthbound perspective is also part of an implicit dialogue. Under the crane new buildings spring up, seasons shift, perspective varies, until, its work completed, the giant machine is ready to be driven away. By the time it leaves, the landscape we knew will have changed and we too will have moved on.

Susan Wicks has published eight collections of poetry, five of them with Bloodaxe Books: Dear Crane (2021), The Months (2016), House of Tongues (2011), De-iced (2007) and Night Toad: New & Selected Poems (2003), which includes a selection from three earlier books published by Faber: Singing Underwater, winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize; Open Diagnosis, which was one of the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets titles; and The Clever Daughter, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. House of Tongues, Night Toad, Singing Underwater and The Months are all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She has also published three novels, The Key (Faber, 1997), Little Thing (Faber, 1998) and A Place to Stop (Salt, 2012), a short memoir, Driving My Father (Faber, 1995), and a collection of short fiction, Roll Up for the Arabian Derby (Bluechrome, 2008). Her two book-length translations of the French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Cold Spring in Winter (Arc, 2009) and Talking Vrouz (Arc, 2013) have between them won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation, and been shortlisted for the the International Griffin Prize for Poetry. Born and raised in Kent, she lives in Tunbridge Wells, and is a freelance writer and translator.